Alden Beatbacker

Beatbacker 12 string.
This guitar was overlooked overlooked by Alan Entwistle from the UK.
it is probably built in China or Korea.
It has a basswood body...although Basswood is a general term covering many types of woods these days.
Alan Entwistle aslo designed the pickups as well...the finish is good...not perfect, but prett darn good, there are a few minor flaws that anyone with a bit of handyman skills can fix.
For instance the scratchplate has rough edges...so pull it off and sand them with 600 or 800 grit sandpaper, also under the scratchplate the holes have not been drilled accurately at all...in some cases there are 2 holes side by side (you cant see them tho...and they can easily be filled)
The tone and volume knobs are crappy and cheap...simply replace them with CTS knobs...and you may need to polish the fretts.
In other words this guitar is not perfectly finished off...but the guts of it...body, PUPS, neck etc...are fine...and thats what counts.

It sounds great!!...it has a chimey sound for sure, and is definitely rickenbackerish...even as a six string it has the nice woody clunk that a Backer has.
I would give it close to a 10 in this area...maybe a 9...it is definitely great and has a nice even tone over the whole guitar unplugged (no fractured harmonics and stuff..like many cheap guitars...this means if you decide to replace the PUPS later on...you will be fine...but there is no real need to do this!

The action and neck shape is spot on..perfect radius, nice medium jumbo frets..its great, the neck is straight...what more could you ask for?
Pickups look and sound great!!
There was a slight flaw in the paintwork...generally I think Mr Entwistle could get the quality control better...I would be concerned if I had my name on these guitars.
However dont let this put you off..these are minor points (scratch plate, drill holes, edge of neck and some minor blemishes in the paintwork.)
So I would gibeve it a nine for the action etc... and about a five for attention to detail.

Its seems very solid and stays in tune...more or less.
One way to test a guitar is to tune it up strike the strings and lift it very quickly into the horizontal position...if you hear tthe pitch drop, then there is movement in the neck and body...some guitars dont do this and others do.
The Beatbacker does this a little...so its not bad at all...Chinese Squires...are much worse...and I've owned a couple of thise as well.

Bought it from Cranes Music Store
Rich is a real nice guy and easy to deal with and it was packed well and shipped to Australia.

At this point I would like to say that I have owned 50 Les Pauls, pre CBS strats ...I have Tele that is custom made (by me) with a Warmoth neck and hand wound pups, 2 Srats, les Paul, Sitar Guitar and have been playing forever.
I can tell you this is a really good guitar with minor flaws...but still (apart from some of the early Jap lawsuit Rick copies) you wont find better easily..I have tried!!
More importantly it sounds, feels and looks great I AM STOKED!!
But...that said I suggest that Mr Entwistle gets the quality control better and gets rid of the abopve mentioned flaws ASAP...this kind of thing hurts mainly the seller and manufacturer...what is the point of having a guitar that is 98 percent good and fails in tiny details that are important to many people.

This is a new guitar with a retro design with more than a nod to the sort of Rickenbackers that John Lennon used to play in his Beatles days. It has three, alnico pickups and a strat-style tremelo (Wilkinson, I think). The whole guitar has been designed by Alan Entwistle, apparently a guitar guru, although not one I had heard of before.
As well as a five-way pickup selector switch, there is a tone selector rotating knob as found on some Gibsons, such as the Blueshawk and this was one of the main reasons for buying it.
Additionally, it has:
Basswood body
Rosewood fingerboard
Chrome Hardware
Set Maple Neck
Double cutaway
Black finish with cream trim
The neck is quite slender and Gibson scale and the tuners seem to work OK

The reason I bought this guitar was that with a five-way selector switch, plus a five-way tone filter switch, the guitar ought to give me tons of different sounds. Also, I usually go for P90s, which suit teh blues and rock I play very well.
With the tone filter off and the bridge pick-up on, you get the bright, slightly jangly sound associated with the 60's, the Byrds etc etc and it is not a bad sound for rock lead, when overdriven.
With the filter off and the nexk pick-up on, there is quite a rich mellower sound that is good for blues.
Sadly, that is about it. The "in between" pick-up settings that give the out of phase "quack" on Strats is absent. Woolly best describes what is left. The middle pickup on its own is OK but undestinctive. The tone filter is the biggest disappointment of all. In every position, it cuts treble and in some positions it cuts mid frequencies as well.
All the controls work smoothly and quietly as one would expect on a new guitar.
I suppose that two useful sounds is one more than my Melodymaker, but as I was expecting up to 25 different permutations, 2 was rather a low return, which is why I must mark this category down.

Considering the constant references to skilled design, quality etc etc, I expected this to be an outstanding guitar. In reality, the build quality and finish are about what you normally get on a #150 guitar. There are some gloops of varnish at the guitar-end of the neck, for instance.
I don't know if the guitar WAS set-up when leaving factory or shop, but even without using the trem, it would not stay in tune! One bend or hammer-on and I was in trouble. The reason, as far as I can see is that the bridge was far too sloppy. I have upped the number of tremelo strings from 3 to 4 and it now stays in reasonable tune in normal play and gentle use of the trem is also OK. Not I have pulled the bridge tighter, I am noticing fret buzz, which will doubtless mean further adjustments. So considering the care and attention that Mr. Entwistle is supposed to shower on these guitars at every stage of the process, I expected more.

It's new, I've gigged with it once; it went out of tune (see above). When I have given it a full set-up it should gig OK. The hardware seems reasonable, so I hope it will last the pace. Likewise the finish seems deep enough to stand a little sweat. I don't know yet if I would want to depend on it but it was never meant to replace my P90's for live work. It is more to provide a different sound for a couple of numbers and also to use for studio work, where P90s can get a bit noisy.

The only place you seem to be able to get these guitars is Crane's music in Cardiff, who sell them on Ebay. At the outset, they sent the wrong model, but had it picked up the next day, delivering the right guitar and a free set of strings. Delivery was free also. The guitar has a 12 month warranty. Other than that I suppose it is early days.

I've been playing somewhere between 30 and a billion years. I play blues and classic rock mostly. My amp is a Laney LC15 all valve baby, which is plenty loud enough for 90% of the places we play. I have a pedal board, the main pedals being a Marshall Bluesbreaker and a Behringer bosster pedal for lead work, as well as a Daphon Chorus (great) and echo (less so). My other guitars are a thinline tele-style guitar with 2 P90s and for slide, a Gibson Melody maker, also with a P90 dog-ear p-u. Also, I have a custom Heinz-57 strat, a Framus semi-acoustic I've had since I was 15 and an electro-acoustic and a classical guitar oh and a Stagg bass I use for recording.
I have not yet fallen in love with it and tend to ring the changes with guitars anyway. I might get another Alden one day, but I would not at the moment choose this model again. Also, I wish I could figure out how to remove the tremelo arm!